Life is full of paradox.  Usually we have no way to align duality until we learn to allow it to BE.  One of these major dualities of life has resolved around the topic of man’s spiritual nature vs. his material nature. Most of my life, I have been attempting to choose one over the other.  Recently, as I have started actually writing my book on our relationship to money, I have finally begun to understand the value of the interaction of these two facets of human nature.

In ages past, the two were separated.  Monasteries were constructed for those who wished to escape the work world and focus on their spiritual pursuits and connect with the infinite within themselves.  Every one else simply made the world go around and did their best talking to God through the local holy figure.

But today, things have changed.  We have a world in which money permeates every aspect of life, so people have to pay attention to BOTH their spiritual and their materialistic – to their inner journey AT THE SAME TIME as to their householder responsibilities.

I always wanted to be free of the material world and as a flower child of the 70’s that was raised in the culturally narrow-minded world of the Old South, I could have been the poster child for a rebel without a real cause. Yet, I found plenty of important social problems to address and eventually I stepped out of society altogether to voice my disgust with our capitalistic excesses. (I actually lived in a tipi in the 80’s and completely missed a decade of pop culture.) But, deep inside was always lurking little miss Martha Stewart, searching for my mint julep, big verandas and white wicker chairs. I was on a spiritual quest, but still was pulled by the material needs of life.  And that took money.

Now as I build my business and coach others to follow their own dreams, I am constantly reminded of how our moments can be full of resistance and frustration, fear and anxiety. I have had many successes and yet this frustration about money seems to resurface every time I blink.  For years, I was unhappy that this phenomenon happened.  Why could I not solve this damn problem and be done with it? Or why couldn’t I simply escape the world of making money? Why couldn’t people make the world go around without the having to pay bills and focus on boring paperwork?

Well, as it turns out, the resistance itself, the problems and the questions are where the richness lies.  These are the issues to study and the access points with which to learn about the truths that one needs to face. Without the challenges we would not be nearly as interesting. Or as spiritual. The finite, materialistic struggles are only the ingredients for the best mint julep to be found.